Adwords and Adsense

Adwords and adsense looks like some of Google's top
mass-market money-makers.
I have mixed reports about them,
including some of my customers that are happy
to use them, and others that get results like
this commenter at Problogger
which suggests that adsense referrals maybe don't always report accurately.

I'm surprised Opera's proxies are so privacy-friendly, but it makes sense to me.
I expect Google will change their adsense policies yet again soon,
if this worries their clients and they don't
want a showdown with Opera.

Google's search is the core of their business and seems
to be the least buggy service, causing the least direct pollution,
but it is a source of indirect pollution.
Web site owners try to "win" the latest reranking, because
most
users stop on page three of a search [BBC].
This wouldn't be so bad if the search results were halfway stable
and not open to much manipulation.

This frequent fiddling - and its dramatic effects -
encourages the bad SEO sellers /spammers /scammers
by letting them show the occasional "quick win"
in the rankings, which helps them convince
more unsuspecting victims to buy their pollution services.
Google's probably not too unhappy with that, because
most SEOs (good and bad) also buy Google ads for their services and clients:
giving SEOs results for their adverts feeds the spiral
and helps Google's profits soar [BBC].

The obvious ways to stamp out this pollution are:

to start using bookmarks again, either directly or
through shared-bookmark services -
as well as reducing google's influence,
this has the added benefit of helping reduce
the typo-domain-squatters, and maybe help
reduce "phishing" attacks (if you only access
your subscribed sites through your bookmarks,
you're less likely to end up on a fake);

to help rebuild the directory
services like vlib and
dmoz
- these sites are compiled by reviewers and
sometimes give better results,
but they always seem to need more help to
keep up with the huge search index robots;
and

Maybe reports of the PI rankings went in a bit hard on Google,
maybe the other Big Search Engines are equally terrible and
maybe there are more worrying things to investigate, but that doesn't mean PI are wrong about Google being a danger to your privacy.
You simply can't see all the data Google holds
about you or control what they do with some
of it.
When Google makes a small improvement in privacy,
it is trumpeted from the rooftops,
but why isn't it in there from the start?

This bug isn't unique to Google (it stopped me using
Ask.com when they made auto-correct hard to avoid).

I disagree with the OED about the old-fashioned z spellings being more correct.

Gmail/Googlemail, GoogleGroups and Orkut Bugs

Due to privacy considerations and more, I will not respond
to gmail or googlemail "private" emails. Please resend your email
from a different place. For more detail about this,
please visit Google Watch.

Googlemail and Orkut use invite spams.
Google seems to think that I should register each and every
one of my addresses with them to avoid the invite spams.
That's dumb. I have an infinite number of addresses, thanks
to debian and others.

The invite spam problem may look like it's the fault of users,
but so many are doing it! Google's
advice about invites
is totally inadequate and I think users who follow it
may end up breaking privacy laws in some countries.
I think Google probably wants to encourage
invite-spamming: how many people will report their friends and
colleagues to local privacy law enforcers? Classic externalisation
of advertising "pollution" costs.

Despite its own spam creation,
Google is keen to be seen as helping to fight spam.
To that end, it files
invalid spam reports like this report [Erich Schubert].
As Erich writes "That totally sucks, that a perfectly valid and correctly sent email, that is also delivered correctly, is reported as spam amongst the big ISPs."

Googlegroups changed its interface
in 2005, causing a whole new load of problems for Usenet,
almost as bad as when AOL connected (but AOL's now left again).
Replying In Google Groups [Safalra's Website]
explains the worst change.
Others include requiring registration to see email addresses.
It shouldn't be a surprise.
Even when it first launched, there were
Bugs in Google's Newsreading Service [RJK]
which are still unfixed and unanswered,
by the looks of it.

Gmail/googlemail is not fit for mailing lists either.
Did you know that gmail has a bug which makes it base64-encode text emails
for little reason, making your message about 30% larger and unreadable to some users?
This bug
has been reported to google, but they haven't yet even acknowledged it.
I strongly suggest using a different webmail - one that fixes bugs.
Testing seems to suggest it does it for non-ISO-8859-1 (West European)
users more than anyone else.

Maybe they don't acknowledge my bugs because
some google mailservers reject entire TLDs
- it seems that I can't use my .coop addresses for googlegroups,
for example. What does google have against cooperatives?

Apparently, the
Google Web Accelerator [is] considered overzealous [ORA]
and it can combine with Javascript-abusing web applications
to cause data loss.
I think someone could have forseen what could happen when
you start prefetching all links, but it happened all the same.
So, what do you think the consequences of sending all your
data to google might be and will it happen?

June 2007:
I borrowed someone's web browser and
tried Google Docs and Spreadsheets,
thanks to an invitation from Will Pollard.
I borrowed a browser because it simply doesn't work on
Any Browser
and left me in a page with no working links.
I hope that gets fixed before it leaves beta.
You can't even view a document you've already created.

Using a full-fat browser, it seems to work, although I
could hear the processor fan spin faster under the
extra load.
It's probably not as processor-intensive as running
OpenOffice yourself, but I think it's comparable to
a lighter word processor.
Forget about web applications moving all the processing
to the server and saving you from the upgrade treadmill:
this doesn't seem a lightweight option to me.

The Docs editor interface
is a page with a Google header,
then a rather confused bar,
then a toolbar with links to drive a
TinyMCE-style
editor in a textarea below.
At the bottom is a status bar.
The confused bar
contains dropdowns, tabs and links with little reason for which is which, as far as I could see.
In fact, some change from on to another when actived.
One of the link/tabs is an 'Edit HTML' that brings the
document source into a text box -
non-Javascript browsers could be shown that instead of
a near-blank page, instead of being left stranded as
I mentioned earlier.

The site looks like it won't work on
devices with small screens.
If the browser is too small horizontally, some controls
are simply unreachable.
The status messages for saving and so on
don't appear in the status bar,
but over the Home/Logout links in the top-right of the
header.
This seems another aspect of the interface that still
seems very beta, very confused.

However, within its limits (full-fat browser, big screen,
fast computer, fast connection), it seems to work OK.
I couldn't trip it up with utf-8 and a few other nasties,
but sometimes the editor is slow to respond and
I had
the whole publishing page
grey out on me once.

Once published, the page is visible with any browser,
but it is not a valid web page - my simple test page
failed the
W3C validator
with 36 errors - impressive for a two-line page.
The exports as Text, PDF and OpenDocument seemed OK,
but not much better at first glance than
Mozilla or OpenOffice will do if you give them the html,
and you probably have those already if you can use
Google Docs and its OpenDocument export.

In conclusion,
I don't see the attraction or the reason for the hype.
If you want to post web pages, using your own editor or
putting a wiki on your web space or getting a free wiki
is much easier to use, easier to bugfix and
might even produce valid web pages.
If you want to use a Word Processor, using one on your
local PC is not much more processor-intensive and
things like OpenOffice will probably produce better output.

Google Public DNS

January 2010: Another new service.
Rick Moen in LG #170 discusses Google Public DNS
in some detail.
So far, there seem to be only concerns, not actual bugs.
The software appears to have been written by a DNS
programming novice, the motivation isn't clear,
and users won't have the contractual protections they
have with most ISPs.

Alternative:
Rick Moen advocates running your own DNS if you can.
Otherwise, let your router and computers use your ISP's recommendation
automatically, like they would usually do.
You'd need to make an active choice to get weaker DNS service from
Google, so why bother?

Google Software Project Hosting

Google's hosting service seems to share
Sourceforge's non-free code
problem.
I've not many reports about the
hosting yet, but I'll be surprised
if old problems like the
registration pressure, accessibility failures, .coop bans and so on from above
aren't repeated.

I'd avoid Savannah and GNA for now, unless you know you are happy with
their policies (such as required early adoption of FDL, or HTTPS-only).
BerliOS.de
and
TuxFamily.org
seem more relaxed, but that does mean you
have to check each licence - a problem for browsers more than
publishers, I guess.
If there's a debian angle,
alioth.debian.org
is another option,
or
eduforge
for education-related things
(thanks to
Penny Leach
for the eduforge reminder).

Blogger and Google's Blogs

Apart from encouraging the larger Atom feed
format, dropping RDF support and unreliable
alternatives to its eyetests,
Blogger is one of Google's best services.
The basic service seems to work in a half-decent manner.
Of course, it still has bugs and that
let someone post a hoax Google news release

Update 2010-02-10: Google has bought
reCAPTCHA
and is
pushing it to webmasters
even though their own blog service does not use it yet.
Don't be conned: reCAPTCHA is disability discrimination,
not an anti-spam test.
reCAPTCHA does not examine the form contents for spam characteristics
at all. There are much better options out there, including the
blogspam
cooperatively-developed service.

YouTube

How annoying is YouTube?
The site complains constantly that
I don't let it rampage through my browser
and I haven't downloaded the latest from Adobe.
It's a bit less annoying now that
ytplay
is available, but it shows that Google doesn't
care much for free software support.

Worse but less obvious,
Google is a sponsor of the World Economic
Forum [WEF site], where corporations tell governments how to control their
electors to benefit businesses. That's the wrong way round:
corporations should be subject to democracy and accountability.
If you've not noticed the harm WEF is doing around you, look
on social media and some of the non-violent anti-globalisation sites.
For more information, see Joel Bakan's book "The Corporation" and
this VIRUS article.

Google's Spin Attack

Google spins like crazy to deflect criticism of its business methods.
It formed the Google Foundation,
putting it in illustrious company with
Nestle, Shell, the Gateses and a long list of others
using its soaring profits [BBC] to buy goodwill from non-profits.

It also runs a "Summer of Code" scheme which
buys some projects a student worker for the summer.
My view is that we should note they "aren't
a particularly good example, but if you can get money out of
them to improve debian and the web search tools it contains,
good luck!"
(from
a debian-project email).

25 Jan 2006: google is
takinga lot ofheatonline
for agreeing to Chinese government content requests.
I won't criticise the actual decision too much, because
it's typical corporation behaviour [film site]:
follow the money, like the rest of the World Economic Forum.
If you're buying Chinese products just because they're cheaper,
you're part of the reason they have the money
and part of the reason that google is following them
- corporations are seldom held accountable.
If you don't like that, maybe you should
Boycott Made In China
as well as google?

As noted in
TunaSpecial's Google Redux,
MSN also complies with censorship requests and
Bill Gates defended Google when the question came up at WEF.
Once this stink also started to stick to the other China-censored
search engines, they tried the face-saving move of
asking the US Government to help [bink]
- like that's going to happen while US shoppers
prefer cheap Chinese consumables.
Just remember the flak EU Trade Commissioner Mandelson
took for enforcing the anti-dumping rules.

"Nothing against ippimail, I do like the fact that it uses ad revenue to
fund charities, even of my choosing, however, the difference between ippimail and googlemail IS the interface. No offense to the developers, but squirrelmail/horde really needs to be updated. There are many issues with it, which is why any time I use a webmail service that has squirrelmail/horde installed, I immediately look for a way to download the mail and read it in a mailclient of my choice, the thing is - that is going against the whole point of webmail. I haven't researched a lot of your arguments against Google, and I plan to, but just wanted
you to know that even though I like what ippimail is doing, I simply cannot stand the interface."

I can't comment much on that: I've used squirrelmail without problem in
the past. I tried to look at googlemail soon after its launch and
was defeated by its totally-WCAG-busting interface.

"Steev,
The interface to Squirrelmail
is
being updated slowly. To speed the process, help spread the word about ippimail so we can afford to spend more time/money on
it."

"Hula also seems to be gathering momentum since the community got their hands on
it properly..."

Tom Chance notes
that the Green Party in England and Wales
has motions put to its Autumn 2006 conference
to boycott Microsoft, Google (both for
supporting the Chinese info-goolag)
and Yahoo (supply of
evidence to China and censorship of trade
union adverts).

World Economic Forum coverage

In 2006 as in past years, satellite TV channel
SFinfo at 13e
will be broadcasting some sessions of the World Economic Forum,
with both German and Original (often English) soundtracks
(I think Left/Right split).
If you have a satellite set, you can see what the barons of big business
are saying: sometimes depressingly hilariously irresponsible.

At 16:00 UTC tomorrow (Friday 27 Jan), the session
WEF
Digital 2.0: Powering a Creative Economy is televised.
Now, the only one of that panel who doesn't alarm me is the first one
and that's probably only because I don't know who he is. Gather
round, one and all, get ready to chuck the rotten fruit at
the TV.